Ironside (2013)

It's Detective Ironside who carries this entire show. No other character is especially memorable in the pilot, with the two characters who stick out the most being Ironside's jerk former partner (Brent Sexton as Gary Stanton) and blonde fellow detective (Spencer Grammer as Holly). Fortunately Underwood lives up to the hype and delivers a flawed, wounded man who is simultaneously a fantastic cop while also being very troubled.

Underwood’s Ironside rolls over everyone in his life, figuratively and literally.... As flashbacks show, Ironside was shot in the back two years ago while pursuing a suspect. His ex-partner Gary (Brent Sexton) has never recovered emotionally from what happened that night.... Their prickly relationship now is the most daring part of the show.

It’s well-shot, professionally acted and adequately paced--but, at least to me, it’s missing that spark of originality that will keep viewers coming back week after week.

This Ironside starts out as a good cop show that Underwood could turn into a very good one.

A competent, connect-the-dots procedural that never offers much of a case for why a remake was needed.

Apart from Underwood, who has class-A TV-star appeal, the show is nothing special. No worse than or much different from your average character-driven cop show.

If Ironside is going for more than cop-show-with-a-gimmick, it needs to go even bigger.

Underwood tries hard throughout and is still a small-screen presence. But that doesn’t save Ironside from being thoroughly overcooked and stuffed with convoluted deductions on how the featured wrongdoing went down.

Despite Underwood's compelling presence and a good-looking cast, this is a rather standard police procedural. Handsome looking, but unremarkable.

Ironside might be a better show if it didn't follow the "rules" of standard police procedurals quite so faithfully.

The show is partly redeemed by Underwood’s snitty charisma and The Killing co-star Brent Sexton’s affecting work as the hero’s self-loathing former partner, who blames his inaction for Ironside’s condition. Overall, though, this is weak stuff.

If Ironside becomes a serialized fantasy drama exploring the mystery behind the fountain of youth, which Underwood must have discovered, then it will definitely be worth watching. Otherwise, it’s eminently skippable.

Too bad [Blair Underwood's] talent is wasted on this Raymond Burr reboot, which casts him as a wheelchairbound cop who dangles bad guys over buildings and delivers hacky dialogue. [4 Oct 2013, p.60]

Underwood always plays overconfident characters, and Ironside is no exception, but the wheelchair aspect makes it feel like he is trying too hard. None of the other characters are defined enough to balance out anything Underwood is doing. The stories are textbook cop fodder.

It’s a thoroughly uninspired remake.... The only promise of entertainment comes from Blair Underwood, who brings some slight layering to the role of Detective Robert Ironside.

The relationship between Ironside and his ex-partner, Gary (Brent Sexton), is somewhat interesting but everything else in Ironside is a well-worn cop show cliché, from Ironside’s tough guy routine to the dialogue.

It’s all so tired and warmed over that the show feels like it’s stuck in a rut almost from the get-go, which doesn’t bode well for it either commercially or creatively.

Being confined to a wheelchair might someday teach Ironside some humility, diminishing his round-the-clock animosity as the series progresses, but for now all it's apparently done is turn him into even more of a jerk.

An atrociously clunky [revival] that keeps only the rough outline--a wounded detective confined to a wheelchair--while jettisoning whatever wit and intelligence the original possessed makes no sense at all.

[Ironside's] handicap has nothing to do with a wheelchair but with a preposterous attitude that's in your face and laughably over-the-top. When the show isn't being a thuddingly ordinary procedural, it's mawkish, wasting The Killing's Brent Sexton as Ironside's shattered partner--yes, an emotional cripple.

All this Ironside does is talk tough and spout exposition endlessly. Yak, yak, yak. There's more talking and less action in Ironside than there is in The Newsroom. Oh, and when there is action, it's just ridiculous.

Ironside is an exercise in cynicism, a safety-first raid on the vaults with not a shred of respect for either the its prospective audience.

Blair Underwood makes the title character an unpleasant combination of macho and brusque. That’s how you get people to go looking for something else to watch.... As independent as this new Ironside is, thanks to the plodding writing here, he is being defined by his disability, the exact opposite of what someone in his condition would want.

While it’s better than getting stung by a bee, I’d rather watch fingernails dry.

It is a dank and ugly affair, with Underwood playing a dour, Nietzschean superhero who is encumbered neither by his paralyzed legs (rendered useless by a criminal’s bullet) nor petit bourgeois considerations of law and morality.